1. Technical Field
Embodiments disclosed herein are related to systems and methods for authenticating a user using low quality and high quality authentication information. In particular, systems and methods disclosed herein may implement a tiered authentication system wherein requests for certain services require a user to provide high quality authentication information and other services only require a user to provide low quality authentication information.
2. Related Art
Network-enabled computing systems are becoming more and more prevalent in the daily lives and activities of people. Where once people would congregate around a television, radio, newspaper, or book, people now congregate around personal computers, tablet computers, smartphones, and set-top boxes such as video gaming systems. Each of these computing systems typically is tied to a specific user in some way and, in many cases, there are a number of accounts associated with each user on a computing system. When multiple users are using the computing system, this can be problematic as the user or owner of the computing system may be authenticated to one or more accounts at any time. If the user or owner permits another user to use the computing system, that other user may now have access to the accounts that the user or owner may be authenticated to. The other user may then be able to conduct financial transactions, send e-mail, and perform other functions using the user or owner's authenticated accounts. In many cases, the other user may not be intending anything malicious, but actually attempting to access their own account and perform functions associated with that account. A common solution is to have the user or owner log out of their accounts before letting the other user use their computing system and then authenticate to each of these accounts after the other user has completed their use of the computing system. However, this can be frustrating and time-consuming to users. Moreover, if the other user had authenticated to any of their accounts while using the computing system, the other user will also have to log out of each account that they had authenticated to, and then perform a full authentication if they use the computing system again.
Accordingly, there is a need for devices, systems, and methods for authenticating a user using low quality information and high quality information such that certain services only require the user to provide low quality information in order to be authenticated.
In the drawings, elements having the same designation have the same or similar functions.